borderland

noun

bor·​der·​land ˈbȯr-dər-ˌland 

1

a

: territory at or near a border

b

: fringe sense 3a

lives on the borderland of society

2

: a vague intermediate state or region

the borderland between fantasy and reality

Synonyms

• border
• frontier
• march

Examples of borderland in a Sentence

in the borderland between sleeping and waking

He describes adolescence as the tumultuous borderlands between childhood and adulthood.

Recent Examples on the Web

The festival’s documentary award went to The Landscape and the Fury by Nicole Vögele, a doc about the Bosnia-Croatia borderlands. —Georg Szalai, The Hollywood Reporter, 15 Mar. 2025

The band, which hails from the Ciudad Juarez/El Paso borderlands, plays a brand of music that takes scraps of genres like cumbia sonidera, funk and pop to create something wholly unique. —Fidel Martinez, Los Angeles Times, 7 Mar. 2025

Capital of the northern Italian region of Piedmont, Turin was part of the Duchy of Savoy, which covered the borderlands between Italy, France, and Switzerland. —Laura Itzkowitz, Travel + Leisure, 22 Feb. 2025

The border, as the Treaty of Lausanne defined it, would follow the median line between the main channel of the Evros River, which spills from the great Rila mountain range of Bulgaria, down through the hilly green borderlands of Greece and Turkey, and eventually into the northern Aegean. —Lauren Markham, Harper's Magazine, 19 Feb. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1811, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Kids Definition

borderland

noun

bor·​der·​land ˈbȯrd-ər-ˌland 

1

: territory at or near a border : frontier

2

: an unclear condition or region separating two clearly different ones

the borderland between sleeping and waking